Still, if all you use are IDE drives, put multiple hard disks on separate controllers. Many systems now have a hard drive on one IDE controller and a CDROM on the other. When you add a second hard drive, put it on the second controller. (You won't be using the CD−ROM nearly as often as you use the hard drive, after all.)

You'll be happiest with at least 1GB of disk on your system, though I'm assuming for purposes of this book that you have at least 10GB.

[1]I recommend these vendors in particular, since they both contribute a portion of their proceeds back to the FreeBSD community. You will find cheaper distributors, but they keep all the money for themselves.

Downloading FreeBSD

If you choose to download FreeBSD via FTP instead of buying it on CD, you'll find a comprehensive mirror list at http://www.freebsd.org/, though you can pick out mirrors easily enough without the mirror list. Each mirror server has a name following this pattern:

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ftp<number>.<country>.FreeBSD.org

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The trailing country code is optional; if there is no country code, it's usually assumed to be in the continental United States. For example, you can have http://ftp3.freebsd.org/, http://ftp2.uk.freebsd.org/, http://ftp.ru.freebsd.org/, and so on, and so on.

As a rule, the FTP mirrors with the lower numbers are more heavily loaded than those with higher numbers. Try a site down around http://ftp5.freebsd.org/,[2] or some high−numbered server under your country code, and see if you can get a nice fast connection.

Many FreeBSD mirrors also mirror other software, and they store all the FreeBSD content under /pub/FreeBSD. Let's take a look there:

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..

.message

.notar CERT CTM CVSup

FreeBSD−current

FreeBSD−stable

README.TXT branches development dir.sizes distfiles doc index.html ls−lR.gz ports releases snapshots tools updates

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That's a lot of stuff! Fortunately, you don't have to worry about what most of it does. For your initial install, the important directory is releases/i386. There you'll find a complete listing of all current FreeBSD releases that the mirror carries, as well as a directory of ISO images for burning your own bootable CDROM. (See your CD recorder documentation for help in doing so.)

Installing by FTP

Downloading an entire ISO image is a waste for many people, because that ISO will include things you really don't need, such as dozens of packages you probably won't install. A better bet, if you have a reasonable amount of bandwidth— meaning a cable modem, corporate LAN, or reliable 56K line and a lot of time—is to install FreeBSD via FTP.

If you choose to install by FTP you'll need to download two floppy disk images first and make the floppies. Why floppies? Well, booting from floppy can take a while—floppy drives are slow by modern standards—but most systems have them and they usually work without a hitch. These floppy images are like old−fashioned DOS boot disks; they contain just enough information to boot FreeBSD, run the installation program, read information from a CD or an FTP server, and write to disk.

You'll find the floppy disk images in the directory for the release you want (that is, 4.5−RELEASE) in the floppies subdirectory. In there, you'll see the following:

∙boot.flp This is a disk image for 2.88MB disks. If you don't have a 2.88MB floppy drive or a CD burner, it's useless to you.

∙fixit.flp This disk holds some basic commands that you can use for system recovery. See Chapter 3 for more information.

∙kern.flp This is the boot disk image. It contains the basic kernel and will actually talk to your hardware during the installation process.

∙mfsroot.flp This is the second boot disk image. It contains the programs that will be used to install FreeBSD on a compressed memory−based filesystem.

Of the preceding floppy images, all you need to get are the kern.flp and mfsroot.flp files. Once you have these files, you'll need to copy them onto floppy disks. The catch is, you cannot use basic filesystem−level copying, like the typical Windows drag and drop. These are image files and must be copied onto the disk in a particular way.

If you're already running a UNIX system, the dd command will do everything you need. But first, you'll need your floppy drive's device name, which is probably /dev/fd0, /dev/floppy, or /dev/rfd0.

If the device name was /dev/fd0, you'd enter

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# dd if=kern.flp of=/dev/fd0

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